Alexander Chancellor: The Kindle is marvellous, but it cannot satisfy an addiction to books

My brother John’s great book sale, about which I wrote on this page a couple of weeks ago, finally took place at Stoke Park last weekend, and it went far better than I had anticipated. Admittedly, I had expected little. For a while I had even feared catastrophe. John, who is 86 and in poor health, seemed to think that he alone could sort out and price some 6,000 books in three weeks, even though he liked to stop and read them as he went along. But he has always had an enviable gift for arousing in others an urge to take care of him; so many helpers duly appeared, unprompted, to offer their services for free. It is certain that without them — and in particular without Ruth Moushabeck, an experienced bookseller, who, with her partner Craig, slaved away for a week sorting and pricing and carrying books from place to place — the sale would have been a complete shambles.